BOOKS
487
the context of Freud's evolving thinking. Gay had access to hith–
erto unavailable archival material (mostly correspondence), and
thus is able to fill us in on delicate details surrounding Freud's
death, on intimate routines of his family life, on Anna Freud's
analysis. That the keepers of the archives, primarily Kurt Eissler
and Harold Blum, did not make all records available led Gay to
attack them in his otherwise generous bibliographical essay.
This has not endeared him to the classical Freudians. Still, their
criticisms are different from those accusing him of hagiography.
In fact, Gay has successfully dealt with what Freud pointed to as
the hazards of the biographer and has not "committed himself to
lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments, and even
to dissembling his own lack of understanding." By subjecting
Freud to the psychoanalytic scrutiny he taught his followers, by
focusing on Freud's most minute motivations-whether in re–
viewing the breaks with Adler and Jung, in noting Freud's in–
ability to enter his patient Dora's sensibilities, or in stopping short
of fully investigating the Schreber case-Gay has been critical of
Freud in the way Ernest Jones in his biography was not.
Although as Freud's analyst, Gay accepts Freud's shortcom–
ings and foibles, he does point out that "the psychoanalysts of the
first generation employed an intrusive style that would have
been wholly out of place in the discourse of other mortals." Gay
criticizes Freud for having turned so many of his erstwhile
friends into his enemies. For instance, he saw "Wilhelm Fliess
everywhere, incorporated in others." Moreover, "Freud's most
powerful interests suspiciously resembled exigent pressures, un–
resolved tensions";
Totem and Taboo
"productively translated" his
most intimate conflicts and his most private quarrels into mate–
rial for scientific investigation; and his
Leonardo
is a severely
flawed performance. He also was cool and detached, without real
sympathy for "poor Tausk's death."
Perhaps Gay could have been even more critical of Freud's
cooperation with William Bullitt on the writing of the biography,
Thomas Woodrow Wilson.
Yet he does state that the book is scornful,
narrow, almost a caricature of applied psychoanalysis; that
"Freud's ideas are grossly simplified, pugnaciously stated, and
coarsened out of all recognition." However, this is not enough for
Szasz, who faults Gay for suggesting that the Wilson book, which
was finished in 1932 and published in 1966 (shortly after the
